I mean Egyptians and Sumerians were some of the longest lasting dynasties and they were extremely regressive and exclusionary. They had a small wealthy elite and lots of poor subjects. Feudalism, humanity's most common and enduring economic system was built around inequity, privilege for the few and repression.
Assyrians were extremely successful and they would commit random murder of their subject population.
I guess you can hold a mirror to just modern civilization and say western civilization... If you forget the racism and sexism of the 20th century... Which leaves the current society and if you're saying the society you live in is the most enlightened and progressive well I mean that sounds like the definition of bias
in all cases? Really. That seems more like a trusim that people often blindly repeat than something that's actually supported by facts.
I can see how Islam being designed as a state religion can be tied to power structures. Perhaps there is an argument that Hinduism supported feudal social structures. Other than that, the idea that religion is closely tied to power structures seems to be questionable and weakly supported. Was shamanic belief tied to the power of chiefs in ancient tribes? I don't think so. Buddha was a prince but it seems tenuous to say that buddhist monks somehow supported royal power in the East. I could go on. . .
I keep reading about these things in the news, and they are nice marketing stance. But I still wonder how far we are away from humanoid robots being commonplace in every day life. I don't share the fear some seem to have towards robots, just because a world filled with robots was something I dreamed of as kid. But I still wonder about the cost and feasibility of robot police officers, or cashiers etc.
Anybody that has to work with the public and is toward the bottom of the economic totem pole has a bit of the shit end of the stick tbf. Has to be an absolutely crushing feeling, especially if they don't see a way to college or if they've lost faith in the institution or degree.
To clarify I am describing the difference in my experiences with service workers over the past 20 years.
It's true that the zoomers got the shit end of the stick, economically and culturally. It's also true that they are literally paid to be polite and still refuse to do so.
Just because you're going through the apocalypse doesn't mean you gotta take it out on everybody else. That's like rule #1.
As recently as the 1990s and early 2000s, that was not the case. I worked plenty of such jobs and it was 'fine' - most people were nice, a few were jerks, a few were above and beyond nice. It was really not so bad, and in many ways preferable from a human interaction standpoint to working at a big tech company, especially post-RTO mania
> As recently as the 1990s and early 2000s, that was not the case.
Yep. A lot happened since then!
- 9/11
- 2008 recession
- 20+ years of warfare
- Student Debt Crisis
- Housing Crisis
- COVID
- Now Venezuela, Iran War, Cuba on the on-deck spot
- Tariffs massively increasing costs of goods
You're talking about 25-36 years ago. I remember all of it.
Gen Z has a much higher debt burden per degree, they have a much higher home price-to-income ratio, much higher baseline living costs, and they are socially and culturally vastly different from the people in charge in this country right now. Now they're dealing with AI pushing down both wages and the number of positions, especially entry level ones.
For sure, Gen Z and Gen A are royally fucked - I did not mean to imply that they don't have it bad as far as generations go. I just meant I don't particularly think it is "interfacing with the public" that is the problem. I don't think people are fundamentally different - I think the system has broken any semblance of fairness or opportunity or optimism for the future.
As a Canadian, I would caution against the kind of universal health plan we have. But yes I agree there should be some kind of public healthcare. Perhaps more as a government owned hospitals and clinics alongside the private ones rather than the fully public system we have here which comes with its own host of problems.
I think it's easy to shout free healthcare as a slogan but I think the important bit is how it's implemented.
I don't think anyone really envies the American system. We have all the capacity problems that you guys do up north, and we pay a lot more out of our own pockets for the pleasure. Our results are also worse.
I don't think anyone from any country thinks their healthcare system is perfect or even sufficient. It all kind of stinks although some countries it is easier to solve problems with above average money (but not if you are average). We need to fundamentally figure out how to do more with less, automation (AI) could help out a lot here and I don't care about purists who want hand crafted artisanal advice about how they need to lose weight or they will die of a heart attack. But otherwise, a lot of problems exist just due to bad incentives.
I'm curious how Taiwan operates. It's a public side insurance system with mostly (if not all private hospitals). Obviously very different population case though, much smaller island.
I don't know how convinced I am. First there were dinosaurs in the past, the brachiosaurus was 4 x as big as an elephant and there are probably yet undiscovered dinosaurs that were even bigger given discovery of partial fossils like the Sauroposeidon.
Also we know in the past there were dargonflys with wingspans greater than 2 feet and centipedes that grew as long as a car.
They were larger but not as dense as mammals, we know had adaptations like less denser bones and different respiratory systems that allow for more efficiency and much more rapid growth into maturity. Modern birds show evidence of all these traits. When the Chicxulub extinction event happened it reset things so mammals got the upper hand on large sizes and eventully won out for the most part. Highly recommend The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs, which I thought was going to be mostly stuff we learned as kids but was educational for me.
You are right that they had pneumatic bones and air sacs and they were not as heavy as mammals with the same volume would have been.
Nonetheless, the biggest dinosaurs were several times heavier than the heaviest terrestrial mammals that have ever lived, which in turn were several times heavier than the biggest elephants of today.
So probably dinosaurs were close to the size limit that is imposed by the mechanical properties of vertebrate tissues like bones, tendons and muscles, while in the present terrestrial mammals the size is limited by the availability of food and by the humans who have always hunted preferentially the biggest animals they encountered, and not by the strength of their bones.
For those interested, I think many of these issues are discussed (but not in the particular way we are) in the trilogy of books starting with the Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs, continuing with The Story of Birds and the Rise and Reign of Mammals.
« Highly recommend The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs » (by Steve Brusatte)
This book fails to mention both Gideon Mantell (1790–1852) and Richard Owen (1804–92). It's through them that dinosaurs entered our modern, scientific world.
I don’t have good recollection of names of early scientists he notes but I think he discusses many of them if not in this work but also in either The Story of Birds or The Rise and Reign of Mammals. I read all three in quick succession so it’s mildly blurred in my brain. It’s pop science so I’m not expecting comprehensive overview but the most up to date science as of date of publication.
That seems to not be the reason from the latest data. Insect oxygen transfer basically doesn't scale cleanly with oxygen in the atmosphere like the original hypothesis thought.
What IS true though is that pterosaurs and later birds and bats came onto the scene, and that's just game over for giant dragonflies.
Vertebrates have 2 essential advantages over insects, at big enough sizes.
An efficient circulatory system and myelinated nerves.
At small sizes, the circulatory and respiratory systems of insects work better (less friction for blood in the absence of capillaries and less friction for the air that circulates as a gas through the body), but at big sizes those of vertebrates work better, due to efficient pumping.
The myelinated nerves have the same speed for propagating nervous signals as non-myelinated nerves that are much thicker, so thick that an insect could not have many such nerves. At small sizes this does not matter, but at big sizes if the nerves are not fast enough the reaction times of an animal can become too slow, e.g. the head might need a big fraction of a second until noticing that something bites the tail.
The combined results are that an insect as big as a typical vertebrate would react mostly sluggishly and it would be able of only very short bursts of intense activity, before becoming tired. This would put it at a serious disadvantage.
Giant bugs are a totally different design though - don't they basically have a big exoskeleton made of different stuff than bone ? That's more like how we design a modern tank or airplane
It's also possible that for larger creatures a less dense and more flexible skeleton material (in general) might be ideal. Especially for animals that are not warm blooded (larger volume to mass ratio might resist temperature changes better?)
One theory about large sauropods is that they were aquatic animals that propelled themselves like hippopotamuses, using their feet against the bed of the lake/river. Just as whales can get very large, so could buoyant sauropods.
I agree. Although the author didn't delve into it he seems to hint that it may not prove useful enough to the companies that spend money on tokens to justify the huge investments in AI.
For me yes, it's very useful. But what remains to be seen is is it useful to the entities and people willing and able to spend huge amounts of money in AI in exchange for increased productivity or profit... And if so is it useful to generate a cash return on the huge cost investments in datacenters that AI demands
I think the title is inaccurate and a bit inflammatory. He's not advocating stripping most Americans of their voting rights. He's advocating stripping a tiny minority of Americans of their voting rights - specifically the minority of Americans that pay no income tax
The suggestion is inflammatory in and of itself. The right to vote is core to democracy. One should expect even the slightest suggestion of abrogating this right, even to a tiny minority, to be met with a vociferous allergic reaction.
Stripping voting rights is a historical leading indicator of a trend to totalitarianism so it has to be nipped in the bud immediately.
I disagree. I don't think there's any historical data showing a correlation between loss of voting rights of a % of the population with totalitarianism. I think among the few countries where it has been tried would be Canada stripping Japanese of voting rights in WWII. Of course this was bad, but at the same time it doesn't seem to have, at least not in most people's view, turned Canada into a totalitarian states.
In my opinion the real trend towards totalitarianism is inability to talk freely about ideas
It's easy and popular to talk about how important democracy or voting rights are. And that makes it a bit annoying because it deprives the possibility of freely exploring other ideas. There's no possibility of free speech or free exchange of ideas so long as portion of the population thinks we have to immediately nip dangerous ideas in the bud without exploration.
> among the few countries where it has been tried would be Canada stripping Japanese of voting rights in WWII. Of course this was bad
That's the point.
> There's no possibility of free speech or free exchange of ideas so long as portion of the population thinks we have to immediately nip dangerous ideas in the bud without exploration.
The "nipping dangerous ideas in the bud" language relates to those ideas being implemented, not being discussed.
Find us a person who honestly believes there a class of citizens (other than convicted felons, minors, and mentally incompetent) shouldn't have a right to vote who doesn't want to use it for political gains.
>Find us a person who honestly believes there a class of citizens (other than convicted felons, minors, and mentally incompetent) shouldn't have a right to vote who doesn't want to use it for political gains.
Easy the philosophers Plato and Socrates who believed that only philosophers and those who sought wisdom should have a say in the affairs of the sate. I mean philosophy is full of ideas of how nations should be organized and it's interesting because there's no dogma around it and no villainizing disagreements
>e "nipping dangerous ideas in the bud" language relates to those ideas being implemented, not being discussed.
Great because last I checked Tobais Lutke was discussing the idea not implementing it
> Plato and Socrates who believed that only philosophers and those who sought wisdom should have a say in the affairs of the sate [sic]
Plato and Socrates obviously weren’t democrats. Also, neither of them is still alive.
> philosophy is full of ideas of how nations should be organized and it's interesting because there's no dogma around it and no villainizing disagreements
That’s because philosophy is abstract. Nobody of any importance is seriously claiming that we should have philosopher-kings leading Western societies. It’s too distant a threat.
> last I checked Tobais Lutke was discussing the idea not implementing it
Lutke was only discussing the idea, but that doesn’t mean it should be paid any heed. It’s also completely fair game to publicly shame him for such ideas.
Actually no. He’s advocating for attaching the amount of taxes you pay to the number of votes you get. Which pretty much erodes everyone’s rights except the ones at the very top. If everyone still has one vote but some have more than one, you’ve effectively stripped their rights.
I think he had a reasonable point, I don't know if he was mad or not but that doesn't take away from the validity of his statement.
Simply saying a confounding variable was missing isn't helpful because it's impossible to control for all confounding variables.
If however there was an important variable someone can think of, like maybe parents who control their kids phone use could also be more involved in their children's learning that could be a confounding variable worth mentioning to think about how valid the study is - but even then I don't know if that by itself would be enough to dismiss the study
Uhh... there's a truly gigantic gap between the shit end of "has confounders" and the good end of "has confounders", and locating where a particular study lands on that spectrum is a foundational skill to evaluating virtually any factual claim you'll ever encounter...
I am advocating for people to identify that there's a spectrum instead of just saying "oh well, every study is imperfect" which diverts attention from understanding in what particular ways is it imperfect.
From what I'm reading, non-users weren't and couldn't have actually been denied entry. It wouldn't have held up in court either. They could be made to quarantine.
Assyrians were extremely successful and they would commit random murder of their subject population.
I guess you can hold a mirror to just modern civilization and say western civilization... If you forget the racism and sexism of the 20th century... Which leaves the current society and if you're saying the society you live in is the most enlightened and progressive well I mean that sounds like the definition of bias
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